[Shotwell] export mechanism behaviour



Hi all,

TL;DR: I think there should be an export setting that reencodes just shotwell-edited images, copies 
externally-edited and copies all unchanged images of an export set. This is probably what many want: 
respecting edits and retaining image quality of untouched images. It could also clear up what 
format:unchanged and format:current export settings mean.

I usually export images with the 'unchanged' format setting. I now noticed that this way, the original images 
get exported - orginal as in as imported from the camera, irrespective of edits (some were cropped with the 
shotwell crop tool, some were edited with gimp). At least for the shotwell 'edited' images I see that this 
behaviour is technically consistent with the 'unchanged'-setting of the export (As AFAIK shotwell saves the 
edit steps and renders an image accordingly when it is used) and this is also described in the documentation. 
For the external-edited images it's not so clear that this is correct in any way as the edited images are on 
storage and just copying these to the export directory instead of the originals would not result in "changes" 
as in reencoding an image. This behaviour is not documented.

Originally I chose 'unchanged' over 'current' or 'JPEG' because I wanted to avoid quality- and 
cpu-time-consuming reencodings not realizing that these are necessary for shotwell-edited images to 
incorporate edits. If there was a 'current for edited images' format setting implying unchanged for unedited 
this would match what I wanted. It could also clear up what the 'unchanged' and 'current' settings do since 
surely another option should result in different behaviour.

Your opinions?

Arian

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